Named after the largest post-war Union veterans’ organization, GAR was organized into brigades, divisions, and corps modeled on the actual order of battle at Gettysburg. The Confederate clans were more popular, but I joined the sole Union clan: the Grand Army of the Republic, or GAR for short. We organized into rival groups called clans. Our medium of study was the 1997 real-time strategy game Sid Meier’s Gettysburg! which distilled the battle into a dozen or so scenarios that we replayed endlessly in infinite combinations. As the blue light of the monitor bathed my face, I logged on to Mplayer, where I gathered with a few dozen others in order to delve into the deepest mysteries of the long ago Battle of Gettysburg. Most nights in ninth grade, after the rest of my family was asleep, I snuck into the upstairs game room and turned on the computer, hoping that the loud buzzing and beeping of the dial-up modem wouldn’t wake my parents downstairs.